The AHV Best Practices Guide Version 4.0 was updated second half of December 2017.

The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform is compute agnostic, providing the flexibility to choose the hypervisor and cloud service combination that suits your needs today, as well as the freedom to move workloads on demand. The native hypervisor for the Nutanix solution is AHV, which lets administrators unbox a Nutanix system and immediately start loading VMs with enterprise-class virtualization capabilities at no extra cost.

This AHV Best Practices Guide document presents an overview of AHV features and offers best practices for integrating these features into a production datacenter. We address such virtualization topics as VM deployment, CPU configuration, oversubscription, high availability, data protection, and live migration. We also make recommendations for such networking topics as VLANs and segmentation, load balancing, and IP address management. Reading this AHV Best Practices Guide document prepares administrators to architect and deploy a VM environment using AHV.

With AHV, Nutanix adapted proven open source technology and wrapped it in the easy-to-use and efficient Prism interface. Underneath Prism, Nutanix configured the hypervisor to take advantage of the seamless scale and reliability of the Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF). As with all design prioritizing simplicity, we removed unnecessary decision making from the user experience. The remaining decisions include points like host networking and VM-level features that sometimes require the administrator to make a choice. This document is the guide to those choices.

Nutanix describes and defines AHV’s features and offer best practices for configuring and operating the hypervisor on Acropolis. After a brief introduction to the Acropolis architecture, the AHV hypervisor itself is expalined. This best practices guide provides the information you need to connect to the network and start running VMs. It also prepares you to customize AHV’s features for optimal performance and to make full use of its extensive capabilities.

In the BP guide you will get the following topics covered:

• Acropolis Dynamic Scheduler
• AHV Turbo Technology
• CPU Configuration
• Disks
• Hotplug CPU and Memory
• Hypervisor Mobility and Conversion
• Nutanix Guest Tools
• Live Migration
• Memory
• Networking
• Open vSwitch
• Resource Oversubscription
• VM Data Protection
• VM Deployment
• Virtual Machine High Availability